Column by Robert Weibezahl

In our media-saturated Age of Celebrity, it can be hard to fathom that there was once a time when people were not famous merely for being famous. While today we think of Oscar Wilde as an eminent playwright and novelist, he was one of the first self-made public figures, who crafted his persona and gained widespread renown long before he had done anything of much note. An early impetus behind his fame was a lecture tour he made to the United States in 1882, when he was only 27 years old and the author of one tepidly reviewed, self-published volume of verse.

An offensive four-letter word

When Merriam-Webster announced the new words included in its 2012 Collegiate Dictionary—entries that included “sexting” and “energy drink”—the news was greeted quietly, perhaps because most of us understand how language evolves. Slang makes its way to grandparents; jargon becomes commonplace. Or maybe we’ve exhausted our anger.Tolerance was in short...

Audio Column by Sukey Howard

When it comes to making history live, nobody does it better than David McCullough. Now, with The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, he’s done it again in spades. You won’t find Hemingway or Gertrude Stein or any of the Americans we usually associate with the City of Light. The Yankees in McCullough’s account were the first wave of “talented, aspiring Americans”...

Setting sail for Paris

A populist writer with a gift for readable biography and a reverence for America’s past, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough delivers another compelling work of narrative history in his latest work, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.In early America, pioneers were the people who headed west. Deftly re-conceptualizing that notion, McCullough focuses on those Americans...

Feature by David Madden

The war that interests Americans most profoundly, the war with which they identify most intimately, even personally, is the Civil War. Thousands of books have responded to that abiding interest. Armed with these four new releases, readers can march confidently into the sesquicentennial, the four-year-long 150th anniversary of the war.A MORAL AWAKENINGSince many books on the Civil War are so...

Soldiers for their new country

In The Long Way Home, journalist David Laskin sets out to tell the stories of 12 immigrant men who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. Like half a million other non-native combatants fighting for Uncle Sam in “the war to end all wars,” Laskin’s dozen—three Jews, four Italians, two Poles, an Irishman, a Norwegian and a Slovak—were relatively new to...

America's 'Era of Good Feelings'

A really good volume of history provides the reader with a keen sense of perspective and a genuine appreciation for the past. This is exactly what David S. Reynolds does in Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, which authoritatively describes the early to middle part of the American 19th century and makes clear how important this period was to the nation's growth in sociocultural,...

Olympic feats

When David Maraniss finished his much-praised biography of baseball superstar Roberto Clemente (Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero), he was "determined not to write another sports book anytime soon." He had previously written a highly regarded biography of perhaps the greatest football coach of all time, Vince...

Hands-on history

David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, has improved upon his best-selling history, 1776, with 1776: The Illustrated Edition. An interactive version that includes relevant period artwork and facsimiles of historic maps, documents, broadsides, newspapers and correspondence, this beautifully designed edition adds a visual grace note to McCullough's eloquent, moving text....

In his final work, Halberstam considers U.S. missteps in Korea

David Halberstam turned in the last corrections for The Coldest Winter, his study of the first eight months of the Korean War, just five days before he died in a traffic accident while en route to an interview for his next project, a book on professional football. A former New York Times reporter and one of the finest nonfiction writers of his generation, Halberstam could switch from serious...